Jeff Alan has a knack for leaving lives behind

Part Two: After the former KOIN news director left his second wife, she thought he’d died

Editor’s note

Reporter Peter Ames Carlin began looking into the life of former KOIN (6) news director Jeff Alan last summer, when Alan sued the station’s owners for wrongful termination. Alan’s lawsuit cites age discrimination and alleges that he was forced to fire longtime sportscaster Ed Whelan and hire reporter Kacey Montoya. But the story took on an urgency when aspects of Alan’s own life — including three children he hadn’t seen for more than 20 years — came to light. The bulk of Carlin’s research took place this past winter and included interviews with more than three dozen people, including a two-hour, face-to-face interview with Alan and his lawyer, Scott Snyder. Carlin and researcher Lynne Palombo identified and then combed through more than 1,000 pages of public documents to report these stories.

When it was time to go, Jeff Alan sped down the desert highway, moving quickly and without looking back.

Everything was behind him now. Family. Friends, colleagues, career, debts. His wife, his ex-wives. Three small children. Even his given last name, Brent.

It was July 1986. Alan was 35 and, just like that, reborn.

• • •

Don’t ask about his mother. That relationship ended badly, and maybe it was the archetype for much of what followed. Alan struck out on his own early, marrying his first serious girlfriend, a student from the San Fernando Valley, in 1972. His wife was by all accounts a troubled soul, and soon after the birth of their daughter Diana, she was gone. Alan was left to raise their daughter alone.

It couldn’t have been easy, particularly given his mammoth work schedule, but Alan did what he could, and leaned heavily on a platoon of baby sitters and his widowed mother.

In 1975 he met a legal secretary named Deborah Moore. They started dating and married in 1976. A daughter, Brandye, arrived in 1978, then another daughter was on the way in 1981. But by then the marriage had soured.

“He became very secretive,” Deborah Brent says. “I never saw him much. He became a man I didn’t know.”

By the time Jolie Brent was born Dec. 6, 1981, Alan had moved out. He filed for divorce two weeks after her birth.

“This was just a really bitter divorce. Beyond anything you can imagine,” Alan says now. “She alienated my kids from me. It was horrible.”

Such talk makes Deborah hoot with derision. “He has a way of stretching the truth,” she says.

The files associated with Brent vs. Brent -- a sulfurous column of accusations, negotiations, subpoenas, contempt citations against Jeff and more -- bring the exploding marriage into sharp focus. Eventually the battle narrowed to child support. The court ordered Alan to pay $800 a month. Most often he was unable or unwilling to do so.

Unable or unwilling? Alan suffered a professional reversal in late 1982: He lost his job and his six-figure salary, then filed for bankruptcy protection in early 1983.

“I have been reduced to using the living room in my house as an office,” Alan wrote to the divorce court describing his financial straits. “I have no formal education beyond high school and ... I am currently delinquent on such obligations as my rent and automobile payments.”

Deborah Brent and her attorney never believed it. “Mr. Brent has been living two lives,” the lawyer argued in court. “Two separate Social Security numbers, two sets of charge accounts, two sets of income records.”

When Alan hears the 27-year-old charges in an interview today, he protests vehemently.

“Never!” he says. “People can say anything they want in pleadings!”

True enough, people say and do the darnedest things in the course of a long, angry divorce. And maybe Alan was one of those people.

Because it’s right at this moment, somewhere between marriage and divorce, between a thriving career and professional implosion, between the dreams of Jeff Alan and the realities of Jeff Alan Brent, that one man simply disappeared.

• • •

Tom Kratochvil, an old colleague from the radio and TV days, still remembers the moment he heard Jeff Alan was dead.

“It was just shocking,” he says, recalling the reunion for Watermark radio syndication employees several years ago. “Everyone decided to toast him. He’d been such a nice guy to work with, it was sad to think he’d passed away.”

Now Kratochvil pauses.

“You’re telling me he’s alive?”

Indeed. Alan is sitting across from us right now and he’s finding it difficult to explain why he left Los Angeles so abruptly in 1986, let alone where he went and how he came to be associated with at least one, and possibly two or three, Social Security numbers that weren’t his.

Here’s how others remember it, as recorded in court documents associated with the ongoing Brent vs. Brent divorce case: On July 26, a neighbor who lived two houses down from Alan and Mary Kilmartin -- they had married the previous New Year’s Eve -- saw a moving truck pull up to the couple’s house, load furniture and take off.

Alan now denies using a moving van. But as Kilmartin now remembers, when she got home that evening of July 26, she walked into the living room to watch a soap opera she’d recorded on their VCR. Only the VCR was gone. So was Alan’s typewriter, books and clothes. Then Kilmartin noticed the note on the coffee table. She recognized her husband’s writing:

Diana Brent, then 14, had recently gone to live with her mother in San Francisco. On July 27 she dialed her father and his phone had been disconnected. When she called her grandmother, Jeanette Brent was frantic: Jeff had disappeared and no one had the slightest idea where he’d gone.

Including, it seemed, his brother Roger, a lawyer representing him in his divorce since Alan had run out of money. But this official relationship ended Aug. 18, 1986, when Roger withdrew from the case. “I have been unable to locate (Jeff) for some time,” he wrote to Deborah’s lawyer, adding that if anyone tracked down his brother, they should inform his office. “(So I can) contact him should an emergency arise concerning his children or my mother.”

Roger always told his wife, Elsa, that he had no idea where his younger brother had gone and told the same story to their mother, who spent the last 16 years of her life wondering and worrying about her younger son. But Alan disputes that his brother didn’t know his whereabouts.

“He knew where I was!” he cries now, before his current lawyer, Scott Snyder, urges his client to stop talking, already.

Roger died in 2004, which makes it intriguing when so many of Alan’s most troublesome decisions dead-end at conversations he says he had with his brother-slash-lawyer.

Alan says he stopped paying child support because Roger told him he’d had the order lifted. “(He) said it was taken care of and not to worry about it.”

However, no order relieving Alan of child support exists in the court file.

Did he think of his kids? Did he worry? Did he even wonder?

“I didn’t have a great relationship with Jolie, as far as raising her and so forth,” he admits. Brandye, on the other hand, was older. “And it broke my heart, to tell you the truth,” he says. “To leave Brandye and not be able to contact her anymore.”

Why couldn’t he do that?

“Uh, I won’t go into details on how Debbie was alienating her from me. But she did a good job. Let’s put it that way.”

• • •

So off he went. Alan holed up in Las Vegas. He says he was in the city for only a month, but he had time to establish two separate addresses, along with two names (Jeff Alan and Jeff C. Alan). He also started using a different Social Security number. He has an explanation.

“I forgot it,” he says. He called Roger, who in his dual roles as brother and lawyer, dug into the files and misread an 8 for a 3.

“He made the mistake, not me,” Alan insists. “And no one anywhere has questioned it.”

But public records reveal Alan also was associated with two other Social Security numbers during his Las Vegas stay, each slightly different, but with transposed 8s and 3s.

“I don’t know anything about those,” he says.

The Social Security Administration didn’t seem to register the disconnect either, though it now says the organization’s inspector general office in Seattle is looking into Alan’s multiple numbers.

• • •

Kilmartin tracked her vanished husband to Las Vegas and recalls finding him with a bevy of young assistants, insisting he was writing scripts for the TV drama “Hunter.”

Then at some point in the late ‘80s, Alan remembered he was a journalist. He landed a job at KNAZ-TV, a tiny station in Flagstaff, Ariz., and at first sold ads, wrote news and swept the floor. When the station needed a news anchor, Alan learned to read a teleprompter and wield the subtle inflections of a TV newsman.

In 1989 he became news director at a station in rural West Virginia. From there, Alan’s life became a blur of cities and TV stations. From Johnstown, Pa., to Memphis, Tenn.; from St. Louis to Houston.

During a stint in Johnstown in the early ‘90s, Alan landed a part-time position teaching broadcast journalism at the city’s University of Pittsburgh campus. He left the campus with a new credential for his ever-lengthening résumé. There would be more. Alan published his first book (“Responsible Journalism: A Practical Guide for Working and Aspiring Journalists”) in 2001. “Anchoring America” followed in 2003, by which point Alan was dispensing media analysis on CNN and MSNBC.

“To me, there was no one who knew news better than him,” says Marty Ostrow, the executive who hired him in Johnstown during the ‘90s. And when Ostrow was tapped to run the CBS affiliate in Portland, KOIN (6), he knew exactly whom to call to run the newsroom.

At first the station’s new owners, California-based SJL, promised to give its new news executive leeway to rebuild KOIN’s news reputation. But the company moved more aggressively to cut employees and costs, and in the fall of 2007 sold the station to the Atlanta-based New Vision Television.

And as Alan’s tenure at KOIN moved to a conclusion in the final weeks of 2007, his fractured past was catching up with him.